Under the negligent entrustment rule, owners who lend their property to unqualified drivers are liable for the damages that these individuals cause. Persons without valid driver’s licenses, or who drive in violation of an eyeglasses requirement or other listed drivers’ license conditions, are unqualified as a matter of law. People with bad driving records may [...]
Some lawmakers are worried about the possible consequences of distracted driving from the four-legged friends that often ride unrestrained in passenger vehicles. Currently, Hawaii is the only state that bans unrestrained animals, and so far this year, peace officers have only issues thirteen citations for violating the law. But a number of states are considering [...]
Driver error causes roughly 95 percent of the car accidents in Florida, whether the cause is direct, such as running a stop light, or indirect, such as failing to slow down sufficiently on a wet road. Moreover, sometimes the error is a simple mistake and sometimes the error is negligence. Victims may obtain damages only [...]
Insurance companies are in business to make money, not to help people in times of need. Since they make money by denying claims, they use teams of investigators and lawyers who scour through the facts and the law looking for loopholes that enable them to deny liability in car crash claims. An effective attorney is [...]
Spring arrives in just a few more months. When it does, in addition to the normal cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs, many Florida roads will be dotted with U-Haul trucks and other do-it-yourself moving trucks of various sizes. Even the smaller trucks are difficult enough to drive on wide and straight freeways. They are almost [...]
Over the last several decades, police have developed aggressive new tactics and began using advanced technological tools to combat drunk driving. At the same time, legislators have passed strict new laws which are designed to do the same thing. Florida’s controversial refusal-to-submit law is one of the more recent examples. Yet despite all these efforts, [...]
Now that House lawmakers have rejected a last-ditch effort to delay the Electronic Logging Device rule, can a similar provision for passenger vehicles be far behind? Since lawmakers voted down the ELD Extension Act of 2017 by a 246-173 count, the ELD rule will go into effect as scheduled in December 2017, absent an extremely [...]
Despite what catchy commercial jingles may imply, an insurance company is not “on your side” if you are a car crash victim. These businesses make money by collecting large premiums and denying as many claims as possible, which is why the company is committed to minimum compensation for victims. In court, insurance company lawyers usually [...]
Human error causes about 94 percent of car crashes, a statistic that is cited very often in many calls for driverless cars. Sometimes, the human error is a one-off mistake that had tragic consequences, sometimes simple negligence is involved, and sometimes the tortfeasor (negligent driver) intentionally disregarded a known risk and thereby endangered the property [...]
Per the negligent entrustment rule, vehicle owners are liable for damages if they allow people to use their vehicles and those individuals negligently injure someone else. However, because of the Graves Amendment, this rule has limited applicability in commercial transactions, such as those that involve U-Haul and other moving truck rental cases. This issue is [...]
